In this landscape, a safe motion function is a drive-level or controller-level safety behaviour standardised under frameworks like IEC 61800-5-2 — Safe Torque Off, Safely Limited Speed, Safe Stop 1 and Safe Stop 2 are the named examples in the search scope. Patents in this space typically claim either the electronics that generate and verify the safety signal, the wiring or network scheme used to carry it, or an application-specific integration such as an elevator or robot controller. The dataset behind this page covers 121 published records filed or published between 2015 and the 2026 cut-off that match those terms in claims or titles/abstracts.

The ranked list covers 57 companies, with the leading assignee holding 10 of the 121 records in scope; fifth place holds 6 and tenth place holds 4. The top 5 combined account for 28.9% of all records and the top 10 combined for 49.6%, which means roughly half the field is spread across a long tail of companies filing in smaller numbers. That leaves meaningful room for a well-differentiated filing even in a field with an identifiable leader.

It is growing. Annual filings rose from 5 in 2021 to a peak of 19 in 2024, a +280% increase over that three-year span. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 figures in any trend chart will look lower simply because later filings have not all published yet — that should not be read as the field cooling off.

Control of motors and generators (IPC class H02P) is by far the densest, appearing in 49.6% of the 121 records in scope. Lifts and escalators (B66B) follow at 14.9%, and general control and regulating systems (G05B) at 13.2%. Because a single record can carry several IPC classes, these shares add up to more than 100% — they show where claim density concentrates, not a strict split of the market.

US8566415B2, assigned to Kollmorgen and granted in 2013, claims methods for carrying Safe Torque Off signals over existing control-signalling wiring — as a single DC or AC channel across twisted pairs, or a dual DC-plus-AC arrangement for redundancy. A new entrant designing a drive that reuses existing network wiring to carry a safety signal, rather than adding a dedicated hardwired safety channel, should check claim scope here closely, since several of the most-cited records in this dataset sit close to this same approach.